Posted
by
timothyon Saturday January 15, 2011 @05:14PM
from the capricorn-like-brian dept.

Greg writes "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, first launched on January 15, 2001. Today, the website is thus 10 years old. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia is hosting some 400 conferences and parties across the globe. In traditional Wikipedia style, the events are being organized by its community of users. After a decade of growth, Wikipedia is an important source of information for millions of topics and remains among the Internet's top 10 most visited sites. It has over 400 million readers each month and has a very small budget for a website its size: just $20 million. Almost all its revenue comes from donations. In its last fundraising push, the organization saw 500,000 users donate $16 million."

Wikipedia's done a lot to damage the 'net. It used to be that autonomous entities acting under often well-known editorial control would be first ports of call for various subjects, but now everyone wastes their time in the edit war game that is Wikipedia. It's the worst example of centralisation of Internet control - Facebook may be larger, but it is primarily an entertainment service. Google's flawed popularity ranking algorithm (does anyone remember when nerds used to point out that popular does not imply

May the next decade see it turn into something perceived as valuable to humanity as Facebook.

The best thing wikipedia could do is list subjects and the people or organizations that are considered useful sources of information on them. This would go some way to getting rid of the most-popular-is-correct bias of the thing.

Yahoo had its directory back in '94. Lists of lists would be good, where the source of each list is very clear and can be filtered on. Then I don't get an ever-increasing list of biased sources, but can stick to lists prepared by academics, professional organisations, recognised hobbyist groups, etc.

You'll find a list of resources used to support the article, which is nowhere near the same as finding an unbiased, exhaustive list of resources recommended by known individuals with a reputation to maintain.

May the next decade see it turn into something perceived as valuable to humanity as Facebook.

The best thing wikipedia could do is list subjects and the people or organizations that are considered useful sources of information on them. This would go some way to getting rid of the most-popular-is-correct bias of the thing.

So what would keep Wikipedia from listing "Wall Builders" as a "useful" source for information on The Constitution and U.S. History? I don't see how turning it into a link farm is any improvement. What am I missing?

Competition usually leads to improvement. If the edit war game leads to more neutral and unbiased results, because of wars among biased opinions, I'm all for it. If I want opinions, I'll search elsewhere. Granted, I won't take seriously articles for companies, some people and generally heated subjects, but really if you find worthless the fact that you can type almost any word followed by "wiki" and find information conforming to a standardized format, I think you're hopeles..

Erm, competition can only work if the incentive is provided on achievement of part of the goal.

There is no incentive for Wikipedia editors to produce an encyclopedia. Ssimilar applies to any Wikipedia-style project (though not necessarily any project using a Wiki: it's quite possible to have editorial oversight).

You're missing the point entirely. The incentive in Wikipedia isn't to produce an encyclopedic information resource. Just because it's popular and large it doesn't mean it's achieved any of its stated goals.

Imagine me setting up a large room and filling it with cans of beer. I then declare the purpose of the room is for scientists to gather and find a cure for cancer. It's likely that room will be very popular for a while while everyone rushes in to drink beer and have a laugh. But at the end of the day all

I see your point, but still disagree. When I'm writing scientific papers, where fact accuracy REALLY matters, I WON'T cite wikipedia. If I want to know a few bits of information about a plant that I saw with a friend while trekking, I'll look it on wikipedia. If I want to know the origin of some food recipes, I'll look it on wikipedia. If I want to learn approximately what happened regarding a historical fact, I'll go to wikipedia. If I want find about the discography of a band, without loading useless flas

Naw, you're completely wrong. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it's very much a positive.

In areas where it "works" -- science, engineering, other technical subjects, reference information (e.g. documenting the stations of a country's rail networks) -- Wikipedia has vastly increased the consistency, coverage, and quality of easily-available information on a huge number of subjects. Prior to Wikipedia, even with a good search engine it was much less likely you'd find information on a particular subject, and if you found something, it was often very incomplete and of lower quality, or if high-quality, was often behind a paywall. What's on Wikipedia now is often a little less well-written than a professional reference would be, because of the multiple authors -- but that's in fact often not really a bad thing, because many wikipedia articles end up covering subjects in a way that's approachable to multiple levels of ability (e.g. they'll have sections targeted at experts, and easy examples for novices)

There are other references on technical subjects that are occasionally of higher quality than Wikipedia., but they're balkanized, often less complete even within their specialty simply because of the effort required to be complete, and far, far, more difficult to find in the first place (often the best way is through the references at the bottom of a corresponding Wikipedia page!). Of course these are useful as a sanity check or different of view for the corresponding information in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia's role, of binding together multiple subjects, and covering all the gritty details, is very valuable, and increases the usability and accessibility of these other sources (much as a traditional encyclopedia or survey might for more specialized sources).

Wikipedia is so useful for these technical subjects that I'm not sure what to think about people whining that "Wikipedia is crap!1!", other than they've never actually used it for anything other than looking up "George W Bush" and "abortion"...

In areas where it "works" -- science, engineering, other technical subjects, reference information (e.g. documenting the stations of a country's rail networks) -- Wikipedia has vastly increased the consistency, coverage, and quality of easily-available information on a huge number of subjects.

It would be good to think that it "works" at least in those areas --- but I'm afraid that's not true without qualification.

There are many technical and scientific topics where there are popular misconceptions around.

If you want to claim WP is so wonderful on technical articles, I suggest you take a stroll over to "Digital Audio Broadcasting". Its a complete piece of crap, filled with blatantly factually incorrect information. For years it was zealously guarded by a couple individuals with a heavy anti-DAB bias, and financial interest in the same. Numerous appeals to admins have been made over the years, with absolutely no mediative action ever taken. In fact the admins will dutifully block people for the 3RR with

I disagree. I'm a professional writer who often covers subjects I don't know well. After following my editor's leads, Wikipedia is my first stop for general background. (The trick is to not let it be your *last* stop.)
Among other things, Wikipedia helps me understand jargon: Even an inaccurate article will describe the issue at hand with industry-standard words.

Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)

Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)

Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)

Then it would be worth almost nothing.

I don't think an average marketing manager would realize that, so it doesn't affect viability of the business model, at least not during the first few quarters... And majority of the articles would stay "non-sponsored" anyway, and there's no real competition, and people are dumb, so it might even be a viable long term strategy...

Long term strategy to make money that is, not a long term strategy to create a reliable encyclopedia, of course...;-)

Jimmy Whales: I think we should just be friends.Mark Zuckerberg: I don't want friends.Jimmy Whales: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you. As if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared. You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want

Having seen and toured Wikipedia's cage in Tampa I was impressed with the actual quality of the equipment and Internet feeds. $20M worth, no. But I would say at least half that. Lawyers, staff and office get the rest.

My name is Jimmy Wales. Ten years ago not a lot of people believed a second-rate day trader turned pornographer would be able to follow the Rand dream by exploiting thousands of people across the Internet into wasting their time writing a successful web site for him, the only purpose of which was to further his fame and bank account.

At that time it would have been silly to suggest that antisocial twenty-somethings would spend months - sometimes years - warring over some irrelevant fact to establish their bias in an atrociously written article covering some topic related to their political belief or esoteric interest. I would have been laughed at if I'd have suggested that people across the world wouldn't consider me bordering on racially exploitative if I suggested that people should donate toward this project to help the "child in Africa".

But it's 2011, guys, and, fuck me! I did it.

So, if you learnt just a little bit about how a lack of scruples and a solid cult of personality can earn a creepy middle aged man world-wide fame while diminishing the usefulness the world's most important information medium, why not donate at least £5/$5/€5? After all, if I can do it, maybe you can. Let me sell you a drop of the most pathological corruption of the capitalist dream. And that's why you're really donating, isn't it?

Despite the fact that I agree with your assessment of the situation, I've contributed a bit to Wikipedia here and there, to clear up some obvious issues in the articles that bothered me. For that, I've been accused of many things, including being someone's publicist, because I removed a clear personal attack on a living person from their biography. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of people editing Wikipedia are not interested in following the guidelines, and they're merely inte

As someone who has witnessed the removal of an article on a mens rights activist and author by a radical feminist and lesbian moderator without a trace of irony or concern about conflict of interest or the evils of censorship I would state that Wikipedia is the finest example of group think and social conformity available in the western world outside of Face book of course!Fuck Wikipedia

i have history as my hobby and i do a lot of reading. before, it was quite burdensome. finding the right subject article, finding it in right detail. then, needing to get more detail on a sub-section and having to go all through that over and over again with horrible half assed results from google, altavista, yahoo searches etc, enthusiast forums this that.

wikipedia changed it for me. sufficient detail on each article, sufficient detail in each of the relevant topics you can go into from in-site links, a

Really, when was the last time you edited a Wikipedia article via Tor or an anonymous proxy server? So, no, the "anyone" part needs to be changed since Wikipedia discriminates against users of those services, who can only edit when their proxy is fresh enough not to be included in the list of banned IPs. Yeah, I know, there's a reason behind the anti-open-proxy policy but, still, not everybody (who wishes to maintain their anonymity) can edit Wikipedia.

You think that article X is [wrong] [incomprehensible] [incomplete]? So fix it yourself.

There's too much on X and not enough on Y? Go on then, write the Y article.

The editors are [self-serving] [elitist] [evil]? Come back and complain after you've done a thankless stint reverting vandalism.

Wikipedia is crazy not to take ads? Would you work for free in order for someone else to get paid?

The Wikipedia criticism industry is a pure product of the me-me-me consumer age. The marvel of Wikipedia is precisely that it is not a consumer product. It is about the producers and their astounding feat of working together, unremunerated, while sorting out their differences, to create an incredible body of written knowledge that didn't exist before.

Wikipedia is crazy not to take ads? Would you work for free in order for someone else to get paid?

Wikipedia is run by a non-profit. I am a Wikipedia editor (same name there as here), and I would happily continue editing if Wikipedia had a small amount of advertising to pay server costs and the costs of running the foundation. Just as I make other donations to charities I support.

I'd rather see small Google style ads every day than those ugly banners for a couple of months a year solid

If an information site carries advertising but does not control that advertising (e.g. through a hands off use of adsense) and does not have a pressure to maximize advertising revenue then there is no reason I can see why it should affect information or bias.

This is especially so on Wikipedia where the editors and the foundation largely interact at arms length and nearly all communications and discussions are in public.

Wikipedia may be an important source but it's rarely 100% correct on any given subject.

I've seen plenty of articles that contained correct information. That said, it would be absurdly difficult for you to find a book/website that is 100% correct in every way.

Sure. 90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research. If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia? Sure it's great on subjects You know nothing about because any knowledge will be an improvement.

I've seen shocking bias, inconsistancy, and lawyering on wikipedia and would not fully trust it for anything.

What's stopping you from fixing it?

Edit wars and editors pushing an agenda. Administrators who go off the deep end at anything they perceive as a 'personal attack'.And spelling and grammer nazi's who revert entire passages for one misspelling. And

90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research.

It's the same for everything else.

If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia?

A place where other people can benefit from your research.

As for the rest of your post, I admit that I'm not sure how often such things happen, so I can't really comment on that.

The problem is that we are not discussing "everything else" but only Wikipedia. And if the poster actually put his/her research on Wikipedia or updated an inaccurate page, it wouldn't matter, there still is no way of knowing if it is accurate or not (although citations help tremendously).

Wikipedia is to legitimate research what blogging is to legitimate journalism. Both provide interesting reads, but where one requires accountability, the other only suggests it.

Not really, that's why I still read books and magazines. They are professionally edited and their accuracy and authenticity is attested to by their reputation. That is why Wikipedia requires you to cite them; there are no expert editors who can check and corroborate the information.

That creates a situation where an article can either contain factually incorrect information that has not been flagged up yet (lack of editorial oversight and peer review), or omit important information because no-one did the res

Ah, so books and magazines are infallible (no, but "professionally edited" ones may be assumed to be more likely to be correct, I guess). I see. Always double check your information. I've seen many articles that contained correct information (admittedly, they are usually the ones that provide citations, but that's why they are there).

There are no expert editors who can check and corroborate the information.

There are some. The really sad thing is that an expert with a PhD who has written countless well respected books has less say in an article in his field of expertise than someone with no real knowledge but more free time.

Have you tried contributing lately? More hoops to jump through than a building permit. Chances are what you write will be removed even if you give good references. I use to contribute but I quickly came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time.

Well, I have. And I've had pretty much no problems, no hoops to jump through. The worst response I've got was an 'unreferenced' message put on a new page I created. Which was quite accurate. I added one reference, and the page has seen no further problems.

Of course, the fact that it's still working pretty well isn't nearly as interesting as complaining about idiots reverting your changes, so carry on.

I have anonymously edited once or twice some obscure article of wikipedia (articles from Mexico and Spanish based stuff) which get "undone" after a couple of days just because some mod does not agree with the truth... or "just because".

After doing it several times it gets tyring and you just give up... wikipedia is just the encyclopedia of the hundred few to choose to spend their majority of time working the "politics" of such site.

I've seen plenty of articles that contained correct information. That said, it would be absurdly difficult for you to find a book/website that is 100% correct in every way.

Yes, but even Star Trek contains correct information on plenty of things. That doesn't make it authoritative.

Historically, encyclopaedias relied on experts for their information (yes, I know, they were put together by editors, not the experts themself). With Wikipedia, just about anybody can contribute and the information stays there and incorrect information stays there until somebody who knows the correct information a) stumbles upon the incorrect information, b) cares enough to correct the incorrect inf

Historically, encyclopaedias relied on experts for their information (yes, I know, they were put together by editors, not the experts themself).

While this is true, that is what citations are for. Really, you shouldn't assume anything to be 100% correct, and no matter where you got your information from, you should double check it. This applies not only to Wikipedia, but to everything (when possible).

How do you know this? Did you double check the information (something you should always do no matter where you get your information from)? My point is that you should always question the source of the information and verify its correctness. Although you can likely assume that information written by an expert is more likely to be correct, it is by no means infallible.

I've encountered plenty of bias and inaccuracies over the years, but it's often a good starting point along with Google.

What makes it a real pain in the ass is the ridiculous bureaucracy that has developed over the years. It's treated as a god-given truth, to be enforced by a swarm of rabid followers with a need to prove something to the world.

In fact, without Wikipedia, Google would probably be even more useful than it is, as people link to things themselves from their pages instead of just letting Wikipedia do it. That would push up Google pagerank for real informational pages, making them show up sooner above all the linkspam.

Disclaimer: Whenever I state something in this reply to sound like absolute truth, please read it as "In an ideal world, they would do it like this".

Wikipedia has a big advantage over Google when looking for information on a given subject: The articles have been written to summarize all the important bits for quick and easy absorption. If you want to get a basic grasp of something you can use Wikipedia for a summary, and then the citations, references, footnotes etc. for deeper investigation.

My main gripe with the site is that tends to be content weighted towards hero worship of currently popular entertainers, athletes and other celebrities. Some articles read like they were written by a publicist's or agent's office and others by obsessed fans.

My main gripe with the site is that tends to be content weighted towards hero worship of currently popular entertainers, athletes and other celebrities. Some articles read like they were written by a publicist's or agent's office and others by obsessed fans.

Maybe that is because they were written by a publicist's or agent's office, or by obsessed fans.Remember, everyone can write an article, and most articles are written by people who particularly care about the subject, i.e. in this case the celebrity. Now who cares about celebrities? Well, usually either those who live from them (publicists, agents) or those who are fans of them.

Not every time. I'm not interesting in getting into an edit war with someone trying to push an agenda.

Perhaps it's **you** who have an agenda... Who knows...

Truth is _everyone_ has an agenda in some way or another. The notion of absolute neutrality is a fallacy and anyone who claims to be 100% neutral is fooling themselves. Striving for neutrality is another issue and with such a large user base contributing there is always likely to be some bias on issues people really care about (which is almost everything) and there's very little you can do about it other than get your information from many sources in an attempt to triangulate the truth.

It's only okay to have someone else present their selection of options to you if you are educated enough to understand what that means and see beyond the terms they present the arguments in. Unfortunately most people are never taught how to do that. Instead of wasting time with Religious Studies we should teach philosophy and methods of critical thinking.

If people just understood how to evaluate the morality of an action without simply forcefully comparing it to something they think of as related an absolut